In the Shadow of Lakecrest(23)

“Oh, my darling,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry. I had a bad dream.”

He reached a hand toward my face, and I flinched. He leaned away, and the mattress creaked as we separated, creating a buffer of space between us. Only hours before, our bodies had sought each other out in this bed; I’d felt safe and cherished in my husband’s arms. Now I couldn’t bear for him to touch me.

“It was more than a dream,” I said curtly.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. His expression acknowledged it was a feeble excuse.

I tipped my head to the side so the lamplight fell on my neck, which still throbbed with the imprint of his fingers. I could tell from his anguished expression that he’d left marks. That he hated himself for what he’d done. Despite my apprehension, his misery tugged at my heart.

“You won’t understand,” he said.

“Tell me,” I demanded.

Matthew’s voice seemed to be coming from very far away. “I still see them. After all this time.”

“Who?”

“The boys. From the trenches. The boys I was supposed to save.”

The trenches. When Matthew had spoken of his time in the war—which was seldom—he was amusingly self-deprecating, making fun of the way he had nearly fainted at the sight of blood or made a mess of wrapping bandages. Stories of long ago, amusing escapades. That night, he finally told me the truth.

“You can’t imagine the state of the bodies they brought into that field hospital. And I was expected to patch them up.”

“I’m sure you did the best you could.”

Matthew turned away, unwilling to face me while he dredged up his memories.

“There was one fellow,” he began, “the one I dreamed of tonight. He’d been blinded by gas, and his body was oozing with burns. I’d studied biology for one year—I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do! I pulled off the field wrappings, and layers of skin came along with it. He screamed and screamed. I wasn’t treating him; I was torturing him. The sounds he made—I can still hear them. And to know it was all my fault . . .”

“Oh, Matthew.”

“I’d had a few close calls before, when my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, but that was the last straw. I covered his mouth and began raving like a madman, shouting at him to shut up. Tonight, in my dream, I was trying to make him stop.”

Matthew took a deep breath that sounded like a shudder.

“The nurses had to pull me off him. The next thing I knew, I was invalided out. Couldn’t talk above a whisper, my throat was so sore.”

“Invalided?”

“Shipped home for what Mum called a ‘rest cure.’ Not that there was anything restful about it. I was visited every night by the bloody corpses of men I’d let die. Do you know what it looks like when your stomach’s been ripped open?”

I didn’t want to know, but I kept still as Matthew described horror after sickening horror, and the world I knew shattered. The poised, self-assured man I had married was nothing more than a thin, brittle shell. Here beside me, shaky, was the real Matthew. The one who’d always been just beyond my grasp.

I was scared and furious and brokenhearted, all at once. My first thought was that I had been duped into marrying a man who might be insane. Then my mind flashed to images that couldn’t be memories but had the clarity of truth. Ma’s body slamming against the kitchen table. The glint of silver as she drove the knife into my father’s stomach, over and over, until her hands were stained crimson. The slickness of the blood beneath my knees and palms, the shrieks and guttural groans. Maybe Matthew wasn’t the only one who was broken.

Slowly, carefully, I inched across the bed until our shoulders touched. My toes sought out his feet under the sheet.

“The war’s long over,” I said. “You have to put it behind you.”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” The sharpness of his voice hit me like a slap. “Mum consulted the best doctors in the world! Not one of their treatments worked. I lied when I told you I’d been in Europe on business. I went back to France. It’s a booming business, escorting tourists around the battlefields. I tried to make my peace with what happened, but the nightmares kept coming.”

Dashing Matthew Lemont, strolling the deck of the Franconia, dazzling me with his confident smile. He’d been a figment of my imagination all along.

“Then I met you,” he said. “I began looking forward to the future, for the first time in years, and the dreams went away. I thought I was cured.”

“Is that why you married me?” A whisper.

Matthew didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself. “It was rotten not to tell you all this before. I didn’t know how.”

My illusions about Matthew were shattered on that dismal Sunday night. But he could never know. As the shock wore off, I was overcome by a maternal affection for the suffering man beside me. I made a promise, I told myself. For better or for worse. If it was in my power to take away his pain, I would.

I clutched his hand and squeezed. “It’s all right.”

Matthew tried very hard to smile. His arms and chest shook with suppressed sobs, enough to make the mattress quiver. My liar’s instinct told me he hadn’t revealed the whole truth, that he was deliberating whether to confide the rest.